There's a variety of customer uses for Cisco ISE, which includes securing the edge of the network.
Cisco ISE allows our customers to concentrate on other aspects of the business, knowing that much of their security is now in place.
Cisco ISE's profiling and posturing features ensure that all devices are compliant with regulatory authorities.
Sometimes some of Cisco ISE's graphical interfaces could be a little bit smoother. However, with the different versions, the product is getting better and better.
We've been using Cisco ISE for approximately seven years.
Like most products, as Cisco ISE evolves with different software versions over time, it becomes more stable and feature-rich. Initially, when it first came out, it was playing catch up with other vendors and solutions. However, now Cisco ISE is probably at the forefront of Open NAC solutions.
You can build a distributed model or architecture, and you can scale out with a number of PSN nodes. So Cisco ISE can grow as you grow.
Cisco ISE's technical support is generally very good. They have different levels of tech engineers, but their tech support is very good.
Some of our customers have considered using Juniper NAC, ClearPass, etc. They switched to Cisco ISE because they had a lot of network infrastructure in place and wanted a single vendor they could use end to end. Everybody has a good relationship with Cisco because they know that if there is a problem, their technical support team will resolve things in a quick and timely manner.
Cisco ISE is very scalable. We can do a small proof of concept and very quickly demonstrate that to customers.
Our customers have seen a return on investment with Cisco ISE. The solution has helped our customers consolidate several products into one and free up their IT staff. Also, the reporting from Cisco ISE enables them to show senior management their network's health.
The licensing could be better across all of the Cisco products. Cisco's licensing models seem to keep changing with different software versions. Cisco is moving towards a subscription service, which would mean additional costs.
Our customers are using Cisco ISE, but we're helping to integrate it into their solutions.
The end-to-end infrastructure security from Cisco AnyConnect host points is very good.
Cisco ISE has helped free up our customer's IT staff to concentrate on other projects. In the UK, where I predominantly work, a lot of the NHS staff have a lot of access switches located throughout multiple buildings. Cisco ISE probably frees up at least twenty percent of their time.
Our customers can use Cisco ISE for device administration for TACACS, RADIUS devices, and individual host appliances.
The migration from ACS to Cisco ISE has helped. Some of our customers were looking at various MAP implementations using different vendors, but we've now got I 2.1 X and MAM all built-in together.
Cisco ISE's ability to consolidate tools or applications has centralized everything and made things a lot easier and smoother for our customers to carry out their day-to-day tasks.
Cisco ISE has helped improve the cybersecurity resilience of our customers' organizations. We've always been able to integrate Cisco ISE into other products. So they're getting more security alerts, making them a lot more secure and happy with their environment.
Overall, I rate Cisco ISE an eight out of ten.